Transforming Your Brand To A Media Company

The term content marketing has been gaining a lot of attention over the last few years and rightfully so. Content is the lifeline in today’s social eco-system so it makes sense. But content is so much more than being creative or simply marketing. It’s more than what you write on a blog, tweet, update on Facebook or record on a video. There is fundamental challenge for brands today to not only create good content but to strategically feed the content engine day in and day out if they truly want to change consumer behavior. Unfortunately there just aren’t enough resources within the marketing department to do this well.

This is why brand managers and marketers must start thinking and acting more like media companies. And the question you may have is “why”? Here are few reasons:

We live in a multi-screen economy.Read this report by Google. We are all consuming content using multiple devices, sometimes simultaneously all the time.

ADD (meaning Attention Deficit Disorder) is common among us. We can blame the multitude of devices, all the marketing messages, coffee or a combination of all three. How many times have you walked into a restaurant and have seen 4 people sitting at a table all looking down at their devices and no one talking? It’s the world we live in.

All we want is relevance. This is one reason why consumers create filters – so they only consume content that is relevant to them at a given time. It reminds of when I was in the market to refinance my home a few years back. During the process, I remember seeing hundreds of messages and advertisements discussing interest rates on billboards, online, search and even conversations on Twitter and Facebook. The minute I refinanced my home, all the messages went away. Truth is, they didn’t really go away. They just weren’t relevant to me any longer. I put up filters.

The customer journey is dynamic. We check text messages, Facebook notifications, @replies, @mentions @direct messages, comments on Tumblr, Instagram, Pinetrest, WordPress. We see status updates, tweets, photos, videos and we read articles from news aggregators, RSS feeds and Google is our home page for everything and our gateway for finding relevance. And this is all done dynamically, no routine, no process, just random acts of content consumption each and every day.

We need to interact with a message 3 – 5 times before we believe it. So if your company is launching a new product or service, we need to hear or read about it in multiple touchpoints such as a tweet, a news article, a friend’s status update, in search and the list goes on.

Can you now see why brands need to evolve their thinking? Relevant, meaningful, timely and a lot of content is necessary to reach consumers. And, to make matters worse … content is challenging for for brands today when you consider the following:

Content planning

Content creation, curation, aggregation

Content integration with paid, earned and owned media

Content distribution

Content Optimization (real time)

Content measurement

If you look at what many companies are doing online today, you will notice disjointed content, confusing messages, very little coordination with paid, earned and owned media; the frequency of content is minimal and the content engine is running low on fumes. And these are just the external things that we see. We don’t see the turmoil of what’s happening inside the organization.

Brand As Media Company

Back in August, I wrote how brands should think about “Operationalizing Their Content Marketing Strategy” and the core message of the post was how social business planning can help facilitate the transformation from brand to media company. Establishing a centralized team, assigning roles & responsibilities (like that of a newsroom) and building processes and protocols that brands (large and small) can take to begin this transformation.

Michael Brito has been making things happen online since 1996 with a legit hustle. He gets mad when the 49ers lose, really mad. Feel free to follow him on Twitter.

Egan Rao

Nicely said, especially “interact a message 3-5 times before we believe in it”. This is absolutely true and what we are lacking especially when introducing new ideas or product in the market. Learned a lesson today.

http://www.britopian.com Michael Brito

Thank you for the comment Egan. That data point is from the Edelman Trust Barometer. I forgot to mention that.

http://twitter.com/cbensen Connie Bensen

Shifting to the mindset of a publishing company is indeed a few steps beyond becoming proficient at content marketing. Last week I met our managing editor at Dell. And we had the opportunity to talk about the challenges and rewards around this type of project. Rishi Dave, the Executive Director of my team, recently wrote an article ( http://dell.to/QQ69rz ) about the benefits of thinking like a publishing company.

I look forward to seeing the results! It will make life for us as consumers much easier when the messaging is contextually relevant no matter the format or device.

Connie Bensen
Global Community Strategy, Dell

http://www.britopian.com Michael Brito

Thanks fot the note Connie. I read the article and it was great! Totally agree.

http://www.facebook.com/chen.lavonia Chen Lavonia

It will make life for us as consumers much easier when the messaging is contextually relevant no matter the format or device.

digital magnify

nice thats true i agree with u.

i have something new about digital marketing.

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